Summary
Episode 9: In this episode of the FourthSquare Solutions Podcast, Kerry Boudreaux and Santosh Kusuma discuss Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and it transformative potential for businesses. Kerry is the Senior VP of Sales and Santosh is the Senior VP of Cloud Transformation Services for FourthSquare. Santosh shares his extensive experience in cloud technology and explains the benefits of OCI, including cost savings, security, and multi-cloud strategies. The conversation also highlights FourthSquare’s cloud transformation services, successful projects, and the importance of disaster recovery in modern business environments.
Chapters
00:25 Welcome and Guest Introduction
02:25 Introduction to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
03:28 Understanding OCI and Its Benefits
06:56 Total Cost of Ownership and Migration Strategies
08:31 FourthSquare’s Cloud Transformation Services
13:40 Successful Multi-Cloud Strategies and Projects
18:04 Identifying Opportunities for Cloud Adoption
21:28 Personal Insights and Closing Thoughts
22:53 Conclusion
Welcome and Guest Introduction
Kerry Boudreaux
Hi, and welcome again to the FourthSquare Solutions Podcast. For those of you who I have not met, my name’s Kerry Boudreau, and I’m the Senior Vice President of Sales at FourthSquare. For today’s topic, we’re going to talk about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or as we say in the business, OCI. And I am thrilled to have as our guest, Santosh Kusuma. Santosh, welcome to the podcast.
Santosh Kusuma
Thank you, Kerry. Really looking forward to answer any questions if listeners want to know how FourthSquare helps our customers in terms of their cloud infrastructure, journey to the cloud, things like that.
Kerry Boudreaux
Absolutely. And that’s exactly what we’re going to be talking about. What is OCI and how can organizations leverage OCI to transform their business? But before we get into that Santosh, can you share with the audience a little bit about yourself and your background?
Santosh Kusuma
Yes, so Santosh Kusuma. I’ve been in the industry for 25 plus years. I’ve been on Oracle technology guide from 20, 22, 23 years. And currently at FourthSquare, I run the OCI and the cloud engineering services. And I’m a former Oracle employee. I’ve been a network admin, worked in the data centers, the DBA and PeopleSoft TBS technologies, ERP applications, I mean. And excited since the cloud happened, especially the second-gen of OCI. A lot of things are exciting when it comes to moving Oracle workloads to OCI.
Introduction to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
Kerry Boudreaux
Awesome. So let’s dive right in. Santosh, when we say Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, what do we mean?
Santosh Kusuma
So, think like any other cloud vendor. Oracle calls infrastructure versus their fusion of the SaaS applications differently. Typically, when you talk about any cloud, you are talking about the infrastructure, which is compute, like the storage, servers, VMs, and stuff like that. Then you talk about the software like the SaaS side of it. So, Oracle calls Cloud Infrastructure specific to the platform on the infrastructure side, not only for the compute VM, but also on the database and analytics platform side. They’re offered as part of the Cloud Infrastructure offering.
Understanding OCI and Its Benefits
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah. So, so when customers are thinking about OCI and what it means, they have their workloads. It could be Oracle applications, it could be custom applications and they’re running them on their own, within their own data center. What are the advantages of taking some of those workloads or all of those workloads and shifting them off of their own data center onto OCI?
Santosh Kusuma
That’s a good question. Before I answer that, I just want to give you an idea of how OCI has done the cloud. When I said earlier, I said Gen 2 cloud. What I mean by Gen 2 is Oracle Cloud, the way they built is they physically isolated the workloads, meaning the network is separate. They are not.
Virtualization is isolated, things like that. So that helps, especially the enterprise customers running not only Oracle, but also anybody who wants to have no noisy customers, meaning running your VMs or your environments isolated within your own network on the cloud. So that’s how easy and secure Oracle made it.
So when it comes to moving to cloud, what kind of benefits enterprises can have? Obviously, if you are an Oracle customer already, you can leverage or get used to or use the benefits of Oracle infrastructure, cloud infrastructure platform like the database platform and the rack for cluster, which is the high availability for your database, Exadata, autonomous database now, and clouded customer. There are many options if you are running already on Oracle or running Oracle products. You can bring your own licenses. You can run everything. And also, what works best from an overall cloud services standpoint, what I’ve been doing and what I’ve been noting for my customers is in OCI, the partnership between other cloud vendors is much easier.
Oracle has a partnership with Azure and AWS. So the future is about multi-cloud. So, Oracle embraced that faster. You will have a lot of other benefits running your applications if your application footprint is Windows-based or if you want to go to Azure for the Windows-based workloads, you can go there. But if you want to leverage the benefit of running an RDBMS on Oracle, then you can leverage that with the multi-cloud partnership.
So there’s a lot of benefits, not just from a technology standpoint, but also from a TCO standpoint and the maintenance with AI-driven tools coming into the market and how the advancements or innovations are happening only in cloud. It’s OCI, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that are best suited for enterprise customers choosing the cloud, when it comes to choosing the cloud.
Total Cost of Ownership and Migration Strategies
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, so you mentioned an acronym in there TCO. That’s Total Cost of Ownership. So when would you say that it’s one of the main drivers to taking your workloads off of your own data center and putting them into OCI? And maybe from a cost comparative standpoint, percentage wise, how much of a savings do customers typically see when they move workloads off of their own data center into the OCI environment?
Santosh Kusuma
Right. It’s a very good question, Kerry. So right off the bat, would say easily, you know, 30-40% customer could save. And the reason for that is, when you move to cloud, you’re eliminating your cap-ex, right? Meaning you don’t have the capital expenditure. You are only subscribing or moving to cloud and getting the services from the operational model. So you’re going to have only op-ex charges, right? So the maintenance charges. And that’s the driving factor behind why your TCO, the total cost of ownership, will be less.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, so it’s getting rid of that cap-ex. You don’t have to be investing in all of that infrastructure. Is that what you’re telling me?
Santosh Kusuma
That is correct, Kerry.
FourthSquare’s Cloud Transformation Services
Kerry Boudreaux
Gotcha. So here at FourthSquare, you are the Senior VP of Cloud Transformation Services. Tell the audience a little bit about what we do in the area of cloud infrastructure here at FourthSquare.
Santosh Kusuma
Right, so we provide cloud services, right? So when we talk about customers moving to cloud, you need to do a strategy and assessment, what kind of environment you have, whether you’re ready or not. So maybe the CXO wants to know whether my environment or my on-prem workloads are ready to move to cloud and what kind of TCO they would like to see or they want to understand what kind of TCO benefits they get moving to cloud.
We do the cloud strategy assessment services and we also do the architecture and implementation, meaning designing the architecture in cloud for their type of workloads and how we move them in terms of automating the migrations and doing an AI-based discovery.
And in fact, we have an AI-based sizing tool we developed and that we use for our customers. And I will talk about that in a minute.
So, we do architect and implement in cloud and also migrate or modernize the services in terms of lift and shift of their current workloads. Or if you want to just replatform, depending on your application needs, we can do the replatforming for your cloud native apps into the cloud and also make sure a lot of your data center exit strategies, you know, consolidation things are taken care as part of this overall migration and modernization. So we do the assessment and develop the migration strategy and then architecture and implementation.
We continue to leverage the innovations happening in OCI along with the security stuff, right? Because the security compliance and governance is so much important now than ever before. So a lot of innovations in terms of AI-based monitoring or anomaly detections, all innovations are happening in the cloud. So we’re going to leverage that. Also we provide, once we move the customer to the cloud (our design, the architecture are implemented) once they are live in the cloud, we are going to manage their database and applications too. We have lot of deep expertise as certified Oracle architects supporting multiple customers across the globe. We have done many migrations and have been very successful.
Kerry Boudreaux
So when we do that initial migration, say taking workloads from their data center onto OCI, we just don’t wipe our hands and move on. You guys can manage that environment through our managed services program, is that correct?
Santosh Kusuma
That is correct. You know, we want to be our customers’ trusted partner, right? We just don’t want to do the migration and be done with it. We want to be your partner. We want to support you for your changes in your business, right? Meaning if a customer is acquiring a new business or anything like that kind of stuff, we can scale up and design the architecture for the scaling up infrastructure as well. So we’re not going to migrate and move and give it back to you, but we want to be your trusted partner to help show you how else you can benefit. And if customers cannot move everything to cloud, and that is what I’m seeing nowadays more, so there are options like clouded customers.
So you can be on-prem, but leverage the cloud benefits. So those are all the things we define or understand as part of our strategy and assessment services when we look at your workloads, how you’re running currently.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah. Unlike typical journeys where we get in a car and we have a destination, it seems like technology journeys, they really don’t have a destination because they keep moving that destination, right? Because technology is always changing. So it is good to have somebody like FourthSquare on your team. And you know, specifically for today’s topic, to be along the ride throughout the journey.
Successful Multi-Cloud Strategies and Projects
Kerry Boudreaux
I hear a lot of talk about some really cool projects that you guys are working on over at your team. Can you share a couple of those projects that you guys have that you’re working on right now?
Santosh Kusuma
Certainly Kerry. One of the most recent projects I’m working on, is exciting for us. Like I was mentioning earlier, if your workloads and customers’ workloads are not ready to move everything off to one cloud vendor, right? So let’s say to OCI in this case. You can always have a multi-cloud strategy.
For one of our customers, we completed the strategy and assessment. And the strategy we created based on the assessment is they’re going to run their apps in Azure and run the Oracle database in OCI. So, we are leveraging the OCI and Azure interconnect as the backbone connectivity between those two cloud service providers. We designed the architecture in that way. And we are now migrating a huge, big database from on-prem to Oracle Cloud, and the applications are moving to Azure. Because they are prior. That customer is especially an Azure shop, meaning Microsoft shop, but they love the Oracle databases that they are using. So that’s the kind of architecture. I’m seeing a lot of customers taking that approach. Like I said, multi-cloud strategy is the way to go because you’re trying to get the best of every cloud offerings, based on what they have.
For example, if you want to go to Office 365, if you want to leverage Office 365, obviously we would recommend you to go to Azure. But if you want to leverage the best database platform, which is autonomous, self-patching, self-maintenance, which reduces a lot of workload on the DBAs, who can focus on your data and getting the value out of data than just regular patching maintenance, right? So those are the innovations you can leverage combining a solution with multi-cloud strategy.
Kerry Boudreaux
Interesting. Any other any other projects that you’re working on that are of interest? Not to put you on the spot, that was a cool one.
Santosh Kusuma
Yeah, so I will share couple recent ones. We also did a migration of one of the customers into OCI. They’re a logistics company. They are present in 60 countries in the world. And we did it on time, that included assessment and discovery of their current footprint. And it is an EVS environment and we moved within the time and budget.
When we went live in OCI, we literally were reported literally zero issues. And everybody’s so happy in terms of the commitment FourthSquare did with our analysis, with our execution, with our delivery. The customer’s extremely satisfied.
Along the same lines, one of our other customers had an extremely challenging on-prem environment, but the DR (“disaster recovery”), they were struggling to have the DR set up. And a couple of vendors, in fact, failed to enable their DR. FourthSquare went in, we understood where the gaps are, what are the challenges, and we did enable their disaster recovery in the cloud. And that was a great success because it failed. I mean, the project failed two times with two other vendors. And for the project stakeholders from customer, it’s a big thing. It’s highly visible.
So once that was successful, the way it was celebrated is customer really invited all their IT team and celebrated by cutting a cake. I didn’t get a piece of the cake, but that’s how they celebrated and they the successful videos. It felt like great moment for us. The FourthSquare team went over and beyond to bring that kind of success to the customer.
Identifying Opportunities for Cloud Adoption
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah. So is there anything else that you would like to share with the audience about our services at FourthSquare and about our expertise? Is there a niche? Is there low hanging fruit for a customer to look at their infrastructure and say, “Hey, we can really save some money. We can really become more efficient if we just do this.” Anything at anything along those lines that you would like to share?
Santosh Kusuma
Right. Yeah. A couple of points there, Kerry. Again, good question. What I notice is, there are customers who are still reluctant to understand or explore cloud because there is a lot of information when it comes to cloud. Is it AWS? Is it Azure? Is it OCI? What do I do? Put AI into it, you know, it confuses a lot, right? We understand the challenges from customer’s mind. How the technology, the advancements and innovations confuse them. But you know, all the tools, the innovation, what is happening, we are going to bring it to you and to give you a better peace to your mind when you’re running things in cloud.
You don’t have to completely move from on-prem to cloud, but see how things work with DR. A lot of customers I see, they don’t have a DR. And in fact, you should have a disaster recovery for your business-critical workloads. And now with cloud, it’s much cheaper than what traditionally all the CXOs have an understanding about. So that’s the low hanging fruit. You don’t have to take big risk.
What I noticed is one of my customers, again, automotive customer, they are running a lot of things traditionally non-prem and their disaster recovery environment is like a 30-year-old architecture, right? So that is something, it’s kind of low hanging fruit like what you mentioned, Kerry.
Go and test the cloud. Your 30-year-old architecture is not going to help when the real disaster happens, but at least you can test it out. See how cost-efficient and how you can realize the benefits of the innovation that is happening in cloud, along with the AI infrastructure and the AI tools that will help and all this along with making sure your data is secure. Your environment is secure with a zero-secure policy in the cloud.
Kerry Boudreaux
So what industries are your team working in right now?
Santosh Kusuma
We are working across various industries, manufacturing and financials like banks and automotive manufacturers and logistics. Like I said, when it comes to cloud infrastructure services, we don’t need to focus only on specific industries. We have wide range of industries we’re working with.
Personal Insights and Closing Thoughts
Kerry Boudreaux
Awesome. Santosh, I’m going to get to some serious questions now. You live in Boise, Idaho, right? Tell me, and I have been to your beautiful home that overlooks the mountain range. Tell me, when you’re not digging into infrastructure issues, what do you like to do?
Santosh Kusuma
Right. Well, I’ll be digging in my backyard for the potatoes, right? Boise. Yeah, I mean Boise has been a surprising place for me too when I was doing a project a long time ago for HP. But yeah, in my free time the Idaho weather is good and I’m close to nature, so a lot of camping outdoors. I like hiking and trekking, whitewater rafting and biking. So these are all the things I like. Working in IT is a lot of fast-paced meaning you need to be on toes to give us the cutting-edge solutions, leveraging all the technology and innovations. But having that life in the weekend or after office hours with family, that’s a true blessing I feel. I got lucky to come to Boise. Not a chosen one, but I got lucky.
Conclusion
Kerry Boudreaux
That’s awesome. Well, Santosh, thank you so much for your time today. And folks, what I love about Santosh is he started his career in infrastructure before cloud technology came around. So, it’s unique that if you get to engage with Santosh and his team, he not only knows the on-prem environments, the challenges, and what you need in that area. But he also knows this cloud technology and cloud infrastructure that came about. What has it been now 15-20 years now that that cloud infrastructure has been around Santosh?
Santosh Kusuma
Yeah, probably 10-12 years, yeah.
Kerry Boudreaux
So you get in Santosh and his team. You get expertise in both environments. So again, audience, thank you so much for tuning in. My name’s Kerry Boudreaux, as I told you before. If you ever need any type of business transformation, please give us a call here at FourthSquare.
We’ll be back in 2 weeks. Until next time, always ask yourself, “How can you transform your business through technology and innovation?”
Santosh Kusuma
Thank you, Kerry.
Kerry Boudreaux
Thank you.
If you’d like to learn more about FourthSquare and the services we offer, click here to contact us. You can also call us at (972) 919-6135. We’ll be happy to speak with you.